Google Speaks: “Backlink Relevancy Is A Big Win In Terms Of Search Quality”

Did you see the Matt Cutts video today? If you don’t know who Matt is, he is Google’s head of search spam, so he is “the man” on this topic. To the surprise of many, Matt confirmed, or reaffirmed, the significance of backlinks for “search quality”. Translating “Matt speak”, that means backlinks still matter.

Questions: Does Google have a version of the search engine algorithm that completely removes any backlink relevancy? I wonder what the search results would look like and am curious to try it out.

As expected, Mr. Cutts says there is not a version of the Google Search Engine available to the public that excludes backlink relevancy, he does confirm that his team runs their own tests to see what kind of results they get.

What kind of results do they get when backlink relevancy is excluded? Much “worse” search quality. Wow, what a surprise. Sites with no links are usually irrelevant.

To quote Mr. Cutts: “It turns out backlinks, even though there’s some noise and certainly a lot of spam, for the most part are still a really, really big win in terms of quality for search results”. Translation: Good backlinks help your search engine ranking and are still an important part of SEO.

Of course spammy links from bots will hurt more than help, and god forbid Google catches you buying links (gasp!), but good links from reputable websites and blogs still help. Article directories and website directories used to be great for SEO backlinks, but we recommend staying away from those sites and Google has penalized many of them and links from there could result in an “unnatural link profile” warning or penalty…or the links may just be ignored so don’t waste your precious time and money.

To get the best kind of links for local or national SEO contact us for a free consultation at 678-520-9925